Warhammer 40000 Dawn of War Review

Dramatic Entry

An army of red armor clad humans with green eyes and Vader masks empty their clips at an ocean of green skinned large jawed Orks. The invading tide of death refuses to submit, their morale broken when a well endowed version of Robocop steps in, using one arm brutally pierces the fat belly of one of the boyz, rapidly pumping lead with the other. The commander in a desperate attempt to regain control clutches the army’s flag and plops it deep into the ground even as he suffers from an exit wound.

The opening sequence of Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War is one of the best animated start ups you will ever see. It sets your expectations high, and a few seconds into the game, you know you will not be disappointed. Developed by Relic, famed for the massively popular Homeworld series, Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War is the latest RTS game that is making waves.

The game features four races from the Warhammer universe. Blizzards award winning Warcraft series is based on the Warhammer universe, which is originally a table top game. Non availability of the title “Warhammer” forced blizzard to use Warcraft.

In the beginning

Set in the 41st Millennium in a post apocalyptic universe, the single player plot revolves around four races. The heroic space marines created by the emperor. These warrior monks are devoted to defending the Imperium against its ancient alien foes who seek the annihilation of mankind. Next are the Chaos space marines who were once proud defenders of the Imperium, these traitorous Space Marines fell sway to the influences of the diabolical Chaos Gods. The bloodthirsty Orks are vicious; these brutal savages occupy more of the Galaxy than any other race. If unified in their villainy, the Orks would soon crush all opposition. Last are the ancient Eldar race with unrivaled psychic powers, The Eldar once ruled a vast empire. Although the time of their absolute supremacy has passed, they remain a strong and powerful force that must be reckoned with.

I, Alone

The single player campaign is criminally short and consists of just 10 missions. The player gets to play as only one race, namely the space marines. He is injected into a world of mayhem, as the planet Tartarus is under invasion. The space marines must prevent it, initially against the armies of orcs, then against the might of the Eldar and finally against their own deferred traitorous Chaos Marines. The story is interesting and involves a veteran space marine commander named Gabriel, who along with the librarian must investigate the reason for the presence of Chaos, the space marine’s greatest foes, on Taratarus. The campaign lets you get familiar with the techtree of the space marines and serves its purpose well by allowing you to battle all the opposing races.

There are tutorials for each of the race which give you an idea about the various features available to each race. The techtrees of each race are quite the same, with the basic Stronghold, listening posts, power, barracks, armoury and machine pit under different names and a few additional structures exclusive to each race. The learning curve of the game is especially short if you have played the extremely popular Warcraft3.

Show me the money

Building structures requires requisition and power. You can acquire requisition by capturing strategic points, relics and critical locations. The default win conditions for DOW have annihilation and map control as conditions. Controlling critical locations not only helps you get requisition, it helps dissipate fog of war over a larger area as compared to relics and strategic points. Controlling critical locations for the designated time can make you win the game. Relics are requisition providers and valuable assets as certain powerful units are unlocked if a team has captured a relic. Strategic points are spread all over the map and must be captured if you want a steady flow of requisition, essential for building an army and structures.

Each of these three can be captured by most units, capturing more than two thirds of the strategic points on a map, starts a timer, within which if the opposition cannot break your domination, he will loose the match.

Inorder to protect strategic points and relics and to further increase their resource generation rates, listening posts can be built on them. These can be upgraded to defend themselves against attacks and also expedite the generation rates. Each race’s units have a blue morale bar which is indicated overhead under the green health bar. The morale of a squad should be maintained at all times to insure victory. Breaking the morale of an enemy’s units can turn the tide of a battle as their performance is drastically influenced by the level of morale. Squad leaders can be added to each unit to increase and restore the regeneration rate of morale and as a power unit. The level of morale is race specific too, for example, the space marines are usually hard balled chaps when fighting against the brute of the Orks, but upon seeing the hideous grotesque chaos, their morale levels drop at a faster rate.

As the game progresses and you develop advanced units or even upgrade them from their base levels, power becomes a major concern. There are a few points known as slag depots in some maps, on top of which you can place plasma generators. Although these cost more than twice normal power generators, which you can build in base only, their power generation rates are much higher. It’s what inside that counts

Every race has characteristic units and a unique style. As with most RTS games, playing with any of them requires relatively low expertise, but being good with them requires skill and experience. Units are mostly divided on the basis of melee and long ranged. Each type of unit is available as a squad. The number of units in a squad can be increased or reinforced during battle. For example, the space marines come out of the chapel barracks as a squad of four, they can be reinforced to a squad of 9. The armory provides for weapon, health and accuracy upgrades amongst others. Weapon upgrades are usually in the form of the type and number of heavy weapons the squad carries. These range from the vehicle effective long ranged rockets, the infantry effective long ranged heavy bolters and the heavy infantry but short ranged plasma guns for the space marines.

The type of weapon upgrades too are characteristic to each race. DOW excels in the way it combines simplicity without dumbing down the gameplay. Although the initial stages of any game require the basic capturing of strategic points, churning out units and building structures, this is infact not the focus of the game.

Dawn of War’s mojo lies in the very battles that determine the games outcome. From the very beginning players will find themselves fighting over control for requisition points and infact encountering each other in the early stages of the map. Dawn of war isn’t base camper friendly, and since requisition points are spread throughout the map, going out of your base and in to the bad ugly world of acquiring makes for exciting play.

Bitch, bitch, bitch

There are a few issues with the gameplay though. Due to the squad concept, individual units within the squad are not controllable without moving the whole squad out. So if one unit is rapidly loosing health, you can’t shift him without shifting the whole squad. Also when you upgrade your units with weapons, you cannot determine which one of them should get the weapon upgrade.

The Orks have numbers and an almost indomitable melee force, the space marines have a balance between melee and ranged including the availability of terminators, the most powerful unit of the game. The Eldar have ranged finesse and the chaos have the inhuman, vile and ugly creatures that wreak death, blessed the damned are.

Such a beautiful world

The graphics of Warhammer are the best I have seen so far in a strategy game. Dawn of war features the neatest zoom feature ever used in an RTS. You can zoom in on your units during battle to see the astonishing detail that has been put in to character modeling. Each one of the units have absolutely explicit detail along with beautifully choreographed animations.

The Eldar, Orks, and chaos both have special big bosses, each one of who has cool death animations. Units while fighting will whip each other in a variety of ways, which you can zoom in on and enjoy the action from various points of view using the 3d camera. Hitting backspace resets the cam to default position, but in most cases, you will be regaled as you can make Spielberg feel like chicken shit with just the use of the mouse and the direction keys.

Each character animation has been uniquely defined, and this is evident right from the time they are building a structure to the time when they are engaged in battle.

Wachu Say?

Dawn of war features one of the best orchestra scores to be featured in a game. The character voices have been very well done and flesh out each character. The music score fits very well with the visual appeal of the game. The sound of each weapon has been intricately defined, and is extremely helpful in game. The single player campaign is punctuated with engine rendered cut scenes. These aren’t half as great as the graphics you see in game, and you will be pleasantly suprised after the initial cut scene to know that the graphics are quite astonishing.

Overall, the Dawn of war universe perfectly balances the oddities of each race, and although some units are overpowered, the soon to be released updates are controlling these minor misgivings. Players can use the skirmish feature to sound off against the computer at varying difficulty levels from easy, hard, harder and insane. Dawn of war supports both LAN and online play, with the direct join feature extremely popular amongst players who wish to play within their own clique.

This is the end

With its induction in the WCG hall of fame games lists for this year, Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War is all set to achieve and probably even surpass the heights of RTS glory. With the soon to be releasing Dawn of war: Winter assault, which will offer those hungering for an extended single player campaign more races to shimmy with as well as new weapons and units, this one hammer is knocking down every door.